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Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives.

Alfred Alumai of Muni University in Uganda, along with Ronald Avutia and Yasin Angua of NilePro Trust, will evaluate the beneficial impacts of a small seeds planter for smallholder women farmers in Uganda. The tool facilitates row cultivation of millet, sorghum, and groundnuts, which saves time and labor associated with weeding and harvesting, and increases production and yield. It was developed with input from women smallholder farmers and has been successfully tested in a pilot study. They will now perform and evaluate full-scale field trials in northwestern Uganda with three women farmer groups over a six-month period. After subsequent tool refinement they will promote widespread adoption by conducting on-site demonstrations and workshops, and presentations via radio broadcasts.

Chip CarterPlan International, USAWashington, District of Columbia, United States

Grand Challenges Explorations

Communicating About Aid

8 Apr 2013

Chip Carter and colleagues of Plan International USA in the U.S. will evaluate a proven marketing model, the House Party, as a new distribution mechanism to enhance participation in international development causes. Supporters of child-focused international programs have been recruited in the U.S. to host house parties that use literature, short films, and other materials to directly engage and educate a broader network of long-term supporters. They will measure and document the effectiveness of this approach and its potential for replication at scale.

John Gilliland of Vita in Ireland will develop a sustainable financial and social model to implement more efficient cooking stoves in Ethiopia. The stoves, pioneered in Eritrea, substantially reduce timber usage, thereby saving operation time and costs. They will analyze the feasibility of microfinancing as a means of payment, and the logistics of training women in the community to build the stoves, thereby ensuring their longevity. The stoves will be distributed to a selected zone in Ethiopia where they will be evaluated for economic, social, and environmental impact.

Bert Rivers and colleagues of Compatible Technology International in the U.S. will test whether a recently developed suite of four manually-operated processing devices of pearl millet, which is a major food source in West Africa, is quicker and improves quality and yield compared to traditional methods. This will initially be analyzed in a test site in Senegal or Mali or both, and they will also explore local financing and manufacturing potential for more widespread distribution.

Setegn Gebeyehu of Oxfam America in the U.S. will work with Ethiopian women farmers, the private sector, and the Ethiopian Agricultural Extension System to develop and provide wooden groundnut shellers with substantial labor-saving and economic benefits. By involving all relevant parties in the design and testing process, they aim to develop low-cost, durable shellers that can be locally produced and maintained. This should promote widespread adoption, which has been a barrier to success for other labor-saving devices.

Richard Komuniecki of The University of Toledo in the U.S. will develop a high-throughput screening platform to identify novel drug targets for treating parasitic nematode (worm) infections, which cause significant morbidity in developing countries. Current drugs are ineffective against some parasitic species, and other species are becoming resistant, thus there is an urgent need for alternative approaches. However, high-throughput drug screens have been challenging because most parasitic nematodes cannot be cultured in the laboratory. To bypass this, they will create chimeric nematodes by introducing key neuronal drug targets from parasitic nematodes into the free-living model nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. This adapted model will then be used to develop a screening assay for identifying compounds with anti-parasitic activity. This approach could also be applied to any other existing or proposed drug targets.

Vishwas Joshi and colleagues from Seagull BioSolutions in India will develop a vaccine against the dengue virus by engineering a defective version of the measles virus to express dengue virus proteins (a so-called virosome), which can induce protective immunity. There is currently no approved vaccine that protects against dengue infection, which causes disease in 50-100 million people annually, some of which are life threatening. They will test the efficacy of the virosomes to prevent dengue virus infection by using them to vaccinate mice and analyzing immunity upon viral exposure. This grant was selected through India's IKP Knowledge Park and their IKP-GCE program.

Arjun Venkatraman of Environics Trust in India and colleagues will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to collect 10,000 personal narratives of the impact of aid programs in rural India. The system will be developed to record a brief audio phone message from low-literate citizens who have benefited from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees employment to any citizen who seeks it. They will train a team of moderators to solicit contributors, who will receive a nominal fee, and to review and cross-check contributions. Validated stories will be disseminated along with geographic location using the web and social media. The impact of this project on how young people perceive foreign aid will also be assessed. If successful, this approach could be broadened to other types of foreign aid programs and to other countries.

Kirsten Hanson from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Portugal has developed a screening strategy to identify compounds that specifically block the final maturation stage of the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite that occurs in human liver. These compounds could prevent the symptoms and establishment of malaria in humans (i.e. act as prophylactics), and block transmission back to the mosquitoes. In addition, high antigen levels will result from drug-killed late liver-stage parasites in humans that could act like a vaccine and provide immune protection against subsequent infected mosquito bites. In Phase I, they developed an assay suitable for high-throughput screens to quantify late Plasmodium liver-stage development in vitro using Plasmodium berghei infection of HepG2 hepatoma cells, and screened the 400 compounds in the Malaria Box, identifying nine hits (compounds that specifically disrupt late liver-stage development according to their assay). In Phase II, they are modifying their criteria for defining a compound as a hit in order to identify those most likely to act as a chemoprophylactic and provide protective immunity in humans, and will perform high-throughput screens using additional compound libraries with candidate hits being tested first in a rodent malaria model.

Karime Séré of Intermon Oxfam of Spain, in collaboration with the National Research Institute for Technology and Science in Burkina Faso, will develop more efficient and durable rice husk furnaces and lower-cost rice sorting equipment to reduce the labor intensity of parboiled rice production, the principal livelihood activity of 18,000 Burkinabe women. Rice husk furnaces significantly reduce the time burden of collecting firewood by utilizing rice hulls as a readily available substitute fuel, and also reduce cooking time of rice by around half. Low-cost prototypes will be developed and then distributed to women rice workers via rice transformation centers in Burkina to evaluate their performance over one year with a view to scaling up to other countries.

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